Soviets Test Their First Hydrogen Bomb
Throughout the late 1940s, aware that thermonuclear weapons were developed by the United States, the Soviet Union worked to develop a hydrogen bomb to counter the perceived Cold War threat. Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov (considered the father of the Soviet...
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Britain Develops Atomic Bomb
Although several British scientists worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII, after the war the U.S. government ended cooperation on nuclear weapons development. In 1947, in response to concerns about American isolationism and Britain losing its great...
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Truman Announces U.S. Has Hydrogen Bomb
In his state of the union address in January 1952, President Harry Truman announced that the U.S. had successfully developed a hydrogen bomb. A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H bomb), is a second-generation nuclear...
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USSR Acknowledges It Has Atomic Bomb
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the USSR utilized intelligence gathered from the German nuclear weapons project and the American Manhattan Project to aggressively pursue the development of a Russian atomic bomb. In August 1949, the...
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Did The U.S. Deploy Bioweapons During the Korean War?
https://youtu.be/Y4ALYK8c5Yg A 1950s report published in Peking by an international commission concluded that the U.S. used bioweapons on North Korea. The report raised doubts about claims that captured Americans were brainwashed into confessing the use of such...
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First H-Bomb Test on Eniwetok Atoll
https://youtu.be/oR3_7A_rQD0 In January 1950, President Harry Truman, despite strong reservations of the Atomic Energy Commission, made the controversial decision to intensify research and production of thermonuclear weapons. On May 12th, 1951, the United States,...
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Truman Hints A-Bomb
https://youtu.be/WQ5X_N4CzUA On November 30, 1950, after the Chinese Communist army entered the Korean conflict, President Harry Truman announced that he was prepared to authorize use of atomic weapons in order to achieve peace in Korea. Additionally, Truman accused...
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Nuclear Espionage
https://youtu.be/mxmsBePZwHY In January 1950, the German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs, working for the British mission in the Manhattan Project, was arrested for passing key documents to the Soviets throughout WWII. Fuchs identified his courier as the...
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Nuclear “Doom” Towns
https://youtu.be/wgpo0qAfwDk In the 1950s, nuclear testing began at the Nevada National Security Site with nuclear bombs mounted on top of a 1500 foot detonation tower so the fireball wouldn't damage the monitoring equipment. "Doom" towns were assembled with shops,...
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B-36 Crash~British Columbia
https://youtu.be/uLnagDIlfZQ In February 1950 a US Air Force B-36 crashed near the coast of northern British Columbia during a simulated nuclear attack on San Francisco. A Mark 4 nuclear bomb, which lacked the plutonium core needed for a nuclear blast, was...
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Einstein Warns of Arms Race
https://youtu.be/K4MjwIFoPn0 Transcript: The Eleanor Roosevelt Show." NBC Radio February 1950 ALBERT EINSTEIN (Physicist): ... The idea of achieving security through national armament is, at the present state of military technique, a disastrous illusion. On the part...
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U.S. Reveals H-Bomb Plans
In 1949 the United States had lost its nuclear supremacy when the Soviet Union successfully detonated an atomic bomb at their test site in Kazakhstan. https://youtu.be/ZQOZp4ThymU USSR conducts its first atomic bomb test - 1949 Several weeks after a successful Soviet...
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Klaus Fuchs Atomic Spy
https://youtu.be/mqQ5_Na8DIc The German theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs helped develop the first effective atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the WWII Manhattan Project. German born, Fuchs fled Nazi Germany and became a British citizen in August 1942. As a long-time...
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Soviet Atomic Bomb
https://youtu.be/sXwSbkdVQro In August 1949 the USSR successfully tested its first atomic bomb at a remote site in Kazakhstan with the codename “First Lightning.” Buildings, bridges, other structure and caged animals were placed nearby to measure the effects of...
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Kalashnikov AK-47
Reliable in extreme conditions, simple to use and cheap to produce – the AK-47 assault rifle was designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov after WWII. The originalI AK-47 model has spawned a host of derivative assault rifles. The AK-47 is reportedly the...
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U.S. Weapons WWII
Some U.S. mass-produced weapons of WWII like the M-4 Sherman tank, the P-40 and P - 39 fighter planes and early model torpedoes, aside from the vast numbers, achieved dubious performance records. Ultimately, however, America produced vast amounts of weapons and...
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Bikini Atoll Atomic Bomb
On 1 July 1946, the United States conducted Operation Crossroads Test Able, the first of a series of 67 American nuclear tests after WWII. The explosion took place at the Bikini Atoll lagoon, situated in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The bomb,...
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Hermes Rocket Project
The American Hermes Missile Project began in 1944 in response to Germany's rocket attacks in Europe. After the war, with the help of captured German rocket scientists, General Electric assembled V-2 rockets at the White Sands, New Mexico Proving Grounds. The first...
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You and the Atomic Bomb
Just months after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, George Orwell published an essay entitled You and the Atomic Bomb in the London Tribune. The first one to use the term "cold war," Orwell outlines in the prophetic excerpt below a rationale that...
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A-Bomb Morality
Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd The concept of a nuclear chain reaction reportedly came to the physicist Leó Szilárd as an epiphany while waiting to cross a London street in 1933. “...It suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by...
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V-2 to Apollo – Wernher von Braun
https://youtu.be/4wIxsYk9UdI The German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was a complex character. Fascinated by astronomy since childhood, he studied at the Technische Hochschule Berlin and the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, receiving a bachelor's...
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Great Marianas Turkey Shoot
The Battle of the Philippine Sea was the last large scale carrier battle the Imperial Japanese Navy was able to conduct. In the air, the sheer number of Japanese compared to U.S. losses inspired the American nickname for the battle - the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot....
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Buzz Bombs – Vergeltungswaffen
https://youtu.be/s0EE5ZGKJyE
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V-2 Rocket
The German V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2–"Retribution Weapon 2") was Mankind's first long-range guided ballistic missile. Powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, more than 3000 V-2 rockets were launched against Allied cities in 1944. The initial V-2 target was London;...
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Naming of the Parts
Henry Reed (1914-1986) was a British poet, translator, radio dramatist and journalist. Lessons of the War, published in 1942, was a collection of three poems parodying WWII British army basic training, which had a shortage of equipment at that time. The poem...
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